Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2011
This could be considered as the ‘swan song’ of a French colonial administrator in Tropical Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, most of these colonial administrators had to leave what was soon to be considered one of the major sins committed by France in the twentieth century: the Empire. For some of them it was a real shock, from which they never recovered. Of course, it was the normal outcome of the very process they had prepared: to teach the African peoples how to rule themselves. But: ‘Did it not come too early leaving the new African elite insufficiently prepared?’ If this were so, was ‘the great sin of France not to colonise but to decolonise too quickly?’